Joan Breton Connelly is a classical archaeologist and Professor of Classics and Art History at New York University.[1] She is Director of the Yeronisos Island Excavations and Field School in Cyprus.[2] Connelly was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1996. She received the Archaeological Institute of America Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2007 and held the Lillian Vernon Chair for Teaching Excellence at New York University from 2002-2004.[3] She is an Honorary Citizen of the Municipality of Peyia, Republic of Cyprus. Connelly’s scholarship focuses on Greek art, myth, and religion, and includes a groundbreaking reinterpretation of the Parthenon Frieze.[4][5] A cultural historian, she has examined topics ranging from female agency, to ritual space, landscape, life cycles, identity, reception, and complexity. In Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece, Connelly challenges long held beliefs concerning the “invisibility” of women in ancient Greece and brings together far-flung archaeological evidence for women’s leadership roles in the religious life of the city.[6][7][8] Portrait of a Priestess has been named as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year for 2007 by the New York Times Book Review.[9] A field archaeologist, Connelly has worked at Corinth, Athens, and Nemea in Greece, at Paphos, Kourion, and Ancient Marion in Cyprus, and on the island of Failaka off the coast of Kuwait. Since 1990, she has directed the Yeronisos Island Excavation and Field School just off western Cyprus, unearthing a sanctuary of Apollo where young boys were brought for rites of passage during the reign of Cleopatra.[10][11] Here, she has pioneered eco-archaeology, undertaking floral and faunal surveys, annual bird counts, and establishing guidelines sensitive to the ways in which archaeological intervention impacts the natural environment. Her fieldwork has focused on cross-cultural exchange in the Hellenized East during the centuries following the death of Alexander the Great. A graduate of Princeton University in Classics, Connelly received her doctorate in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College where she later served as an Assistant Dean of the Undergraduate College and Lecturer in Classical Archaeology. She has held visiting fellowships at All Souls College, Magdalen College, New College, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, and has been a Visiting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. She held the Norbert Schimmel Fellowship and Classical Fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is currently a Visiting Scholar in Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Connelly is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Royal Geographical Society, the Explorers Club, and the Society of Women Geographers. In 2003, President George W. Bush appointed Connelly to the Cultural Property Advisory Committee, U.S. Department of State. She was reappointed to the post in 2007. In collaboration with architect Demetri Porphyrios, Connelly submitted a proposal for the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition in 2003.[12] She has delivered the Benjamin West Memorial Lecture at Swarthmore College; the Theodore S. Lowe Lecture at the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore; the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation Senior Visiting Scholar Lectures;[13] and the Phi Beta Kappa Society Visiting Scholar Lectures. In 2007, she delivered the Spencer Trask Lecture at Princeton University.[14] She has spoken on Greek Priestesses for Andrew Marr’s “Start the Week” program, BBC Radio 4.[15] In 2007, Connelly appeared in Star Wars: The Legacy Revealed (The History Channel) where she discussed classical antecedents for epic themes in the Star Wars saga.[16] She has also contributed to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Daily News.
Bibliography
- Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece Princeton University Press (2007). (Sample chapter [17])
- Votive Sculpture of Hellenistic Cyprus (New York and Nicosia 1988).
- "Parthenon and Parthenoi: A Mythological Interpretation of the Parthenon Frieze,” American Journal of Archaeology 100 (1996) 53-80. [18]
- “Narrative and Image in Attic Vase Painting: Ajax and Kassandra at the Trojan Palladion,” in Peter Holiday, ed., Narrative and Event in Ancient Art (Cambridge. 1993) 88-129.
- “Votive Offerings of Hellenistic Failaka: Evidence for Herakles Cult,” In L'Arabie Préislamique et son Environnement Historique et Culturel, Université des Sciences Humaine de Strasbourg (Leiden 1989) 145-158.
- Field Reports on the Yeronisos Island Excavations, Reports of the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus, 2002-2007.
- “The Legacy of Classical Athens in Post 9/11 New York,” in The Future of New York: An International Perspective, ed. E. Posner, Properties: The Review of the Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute (Spring 2006) 204-213.
